Applying Lateral Wisdom to Personal, Organizational, and Church Learning

March 22, 2011

In the Thin Walled church- Learning takes place in multiple locations, venues, and times- Real Space and Digital Space- on-demand and “just-in-time.”

A Thin Walled church designs with Mobile, Global, and Local in mind at all times.

A Thin Walled church increases choice of- time, location, delivery, and content.

Thinning the walls is developing an Internet campus and going to the Cloud. Thin Walled churches enable services MON-SUN, anytime, and delivered anywhere.

Thin Walled churches make it easy to share knowledge, wisdom, and insight among teams inside AND among other churches, fields, and professions outside.

A Thin Walled church gets new ideas from internal and external sources. These ideas are free to be explored and lead to organic innovation due to a loose organizational structure—thin walls between teams, departments, staff, and leaders.

Thin Walled churches value social learning values and reciprocity. Thin Walled churches share through the network. The network remembers if you helped someone learn. The thin walls in networks know...If you didn't they remember that too.

March 07, 2011

In a Learning Network, if you want to get more knowledge then you need to give away more knowledge, share more learning, and help others increase their learning.

In a Learning Network—each person is a node in a massive network of networks.

In the Learning Network-social ties, learning events, learning media, etc. are now organized around the individual (not the group or community).

We have less real face-to-face time with others, but more contract throughout the day via technology and networks. We are now just a likely to learn from someone we see face-to-face during our day, as we are to learn from someone we never see who is in our network.

In the Learning Network- we have moved from place-to-place contact to person-to-person contact through our technology and networks.

The place of connectivity and learning no longer is a physical place. Learning Networks allow for learning outside of the limitations of time and space.

We are members of networks with many loose connections. View connections in terms of reciprocity- we must manage these connections to maximize learning opportunities.

Reciprocity into our networks is not only key...but it leaves a digital trace. People will know if we have helped others learn.

Learning Networks provide for "just-in-time" learning, serendipitous learning. It allows you to leverage your learning with others…but you have to share.

February 28, 2011

If you want to your organization to be able to adapt and change, then your organization needs to get all people “learning” in the same direction. You need to achieve Dynamic Learning Alignment.

Dynamic Learning Alignment- DLA is reached when the people in your organization are all simultaneously learning what the organization needs to know to succeed in an ever-changing environment.

DLA is learning for the current environmental needs while at the same time learning to prepare for future challenges and opportunities.

DLA requires TriDextrous Learning. Learners prepare for their work, projects, and challenges by learning before directly addressing the work, learning during the work, and learning after the work has been completed. The learner learns about past problems and solutions, current problems and solutions, and also learns about potential future problems and solutions.

When DLA is reached in your organization, all your people will be learning for current and future success in an ever-changing and increasingly complex environment.

DLA enables an organization to become and remain incredibly flexible and adaptable. If your organization is built to change then it is built to learn –

February 21, 2011

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said, …”there are known 'knowns.' There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.”

He was basically describing 3 levels of ignorance—lack of knowledge or information.

The 3 Levels of Ignorance

Level 1-Things you “know.”

Level 2-Things you “know you don’t know.”

Level 3- Things you “don’t know you don’t know.”

But Innovation expert Steven Shapiro in a this post, thinks there might another dimension or level.

Level 4- Things you “don’t know you know.”

Steven explains it this way. “Inside of organizations, there is so much untapped knowledge. To combat this, over the past two decades, companies have invested millions of dollars in knowledge management systems. The objective has been to capture the company’s knowledge."

Your organization or church is filled with untapped knowledge.

But as Steven explains there is a problem. “The problem is, the knowledge management databases usually become so large and unwieldy that they are unusable. I can attest from experience that these systems often end up becoming digital piles of untapped information. Finding what you want can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Or, more accurately, it is like finding a specific needle in a stack of needles.”

“Instead of posting knowledge which sits passively in a database waiting for someone to find it, you post your question to your “community” so that it can be answered at the time of need.”

How much untapped knowledge is in the heads of your staff and teams. We need to become aware of what we know.

AWARRENESS

I use the acronym- AWARRENESS to describe how organizations and churches can think about their knowledge.

Ambidextrous Thinking

Lateral Wisdom

Abilities

Roles

Response-ability

Relationships

Education

Networks

Experience

Skills

Scalability

Of those, lets look at Relationships and Networks.

Relationships

Often times we forget just how important the relationships outside of our department and even our organizational walls can be. Each staff member has a network of relationships that pass outside your walls, which they can leverage to provide insight, help, advice, knowledge, and wisdom for their work.

The relationships developed by each person can provide a myriad of useful outsiders to help overcome problems, create, and innovate.

Networks

It’s an inherent advantage of the “network.” These vast arrays of connections and “weak-ties” are combined and blended to create networked churches and organizations. Fluidly moving between physical and virtual networks to communicate, collaborate, and share ideas, collect ideas, data, strategies, and information. Each person being a portal or node to their individual network makes the church or organization exponentially stronger, knowledgeable, and wise.

We are able to maximize individual members’ Relationships and Networks to the advantage of the whole.

Steven says, “Sometimes the solution can be sitting in your knowledge management system…and you don’t even know it because it is too difficult to find.”

Learning What We Already Knew

The answers we are looking for, the knowledge that we seek, may reside within our relationships, our networks, and ourselves. We may be surprised to find out that we have been dealing with Level 4 Ignorance all this time.

By practicing a little “reverse knowledge management,” we may be surprised to learn what we already knew.

February 16, 2011

The Big Shift has large implications for both organizational learning and, possibly even more significantly, personal learning. The Big Shift is creating an environment in which our current knowledge is quickly becoming perishable. And this fact is going to require that we not only become life-long learners, but rapid learners.

Personal Implications of the Big Shift

“We discover, to our dismay, that the significant investments we made in education in the early part of our lives was just the beginning. In order to stay successful in a world of accelerating change, we need to find ways to learn faster, often in areas that we once viewed as quite peripheral to our professions.”

“What we knew yesterday—either as employees or in terms of what our institutions as a whole knows about its business—is proving to be less and less helpful with the challenges and opportunities we confront today.”

What we learn is quickly becoming perishable. Static knowledge has an important and valuable role, but things are changing so fast, and we are being called upon to do more and more, so we need to develop a stream or flow of rapid tacit knowledge acquisition.

Most of the new things we will need to learn are best learned while working with others, not from a textbook or lecture. You need a network and people to collaborate with, to co-create new knowledge and to learn from. You need the tacit knowledge that comes from collaborating and learning from others. A book can’t teach you how to ride a bike. A lecture cannot prepare you to take your first swim in a pool. This is tacit knowledge that must be experienced to learn.

And here is the key. Our current environment is asking us to solve an ever increasing array of complex problems, many of which cannot be solved through the simple explicit knowledge which we learned or currently posses, but rather tacit knowledge that is hard to explain and is learned through experience and often directly from the various people and connections in our personal networks.

So to keep our knowledge fresh we must be rapid learners of tacit knowledge. In other words, we must learn experientially from the source.

In my mind, it's the similar to the differences between a search engine and a network.

February 08, 2011

During times of collaboration, do people consider your ideas good enough to "subscribe" to or do they just scan, skip, or even worse, consider them "spam?"

One of my favorite blogs is Lateral Action. Contributing writer Rajesh Setty posted about whether bloggers, Twitters, etc., could know if their ideas were succeeding in influencing their audiences in a positive way. His idea is that the audience would “tell them” by the manner in which they responded to the online content.

This got me thinking about how we know if the ideas we share in team meetings, staff meetings, etc., are influencing the "audience" of our co-workers or team members. Are they responding to what I am saying. Are they listening or ignoring me? Are they subscribing to my ideas and sharing them? Or do they simply see my ideas as "spam" in the conversation?

In many ways...how we react to the ideas we hear during times of collaboration is similar to how we respond to the content we encounter daily on the web.

Great ideas engage us. We hear great ideas and then want to leverage them. Some ideas transform the way we think about a topic or problem. And some ideas just waste our time.

What I found interesting, is this closely mirrors how we tend to collaborate with each other.

Rajesh suggests there is 9 ways people respond to content. Spam, Skip, Scan, Stop, Save, Shift, Send, Spread, and Subscribe. Remixing these, I found there are 9 ways we respond to ideas when we collaborate in our teams.

1. Spam:“If your content does not provide a reasonable ROII (return-on-investment for an interaction) for the reader or is self-serving or simply useless, the reader will mark it as spam. Posting something that may be assessed, as “spam” is the fastest way to losing credibility.”

If your ideas, thoughts and comments do not provide any benefit to your team, or worse, seem self-serving as opposed to meeting the needs of your team or organization, you are going to lose credibility as a member. Make a contribution through collaboration that benefits the team and the organization.

2. Skip: “The reader makes an assessment that he or she won’t lose much by reading it. In this case, the reader has not written you off yet but if you consistently create content that is worth “skipping,” the reader might write you off.”

The worst thing that can happen to you as team member is to have others stop listening and stop giving any consideration to your ideas, thoughts, and comments. If you consistently fail to add to the discussion in a positive way, or focus on yourself instead of the issue at hand, the organizational needs, etc., people are going to consider your ideas, thoughts and comments worth skipping.

“Skipping” is a failure in collaboration.

3. Scan:“The reader thinks there are only a few parts that are of relevance and wants to get right to the core of the content and skip the rest.”

Cut to the chase. The most valuable resource for your staff is their time. Don’t waste people’s time. Effectively collaborate by getting to the point, being succinct, staying on topic, driving to the core of the issue, and providing possible solutions or ideas to the issue at hand. If you want team members to stop, focus, consider your ideas, and collaborate on them--get to the core quickly.

4. Stop: “The reader is touched by the article and stops to think about the article, it’s relevance and what it means to him or her personally and professionally.”

During team meetings our sharing goal should be to get members to "hear" things that make them stop, take notice, and want to dig deeper. Great ideas, meaningful comments, powerful solutions make teams stop, think, and collaborate to create impact for the organization.5. Save:“The content is so good that the reader might want to re-visit this multiple times.”

Smart teams will save great ideas and revisit them. Smart teams will save the best ideas and look for ways to use and apply them in new situations. Knowledge Management should focus on content that is so good your organization will want to revisit it.

6. Shift:“The article is transformational. The reader is so deeply affected (in a positive way) by the article that it shifts some of their values and beliefs. In other words, this piece of writing will transform the reader and make him or her grow.”

An important aspect of any organization or team is the word “learning.” Learning teams and organizations are always learning from each other, from current research, from experience, etc. Learning teams and organization adjust or shift what they do, how they do it, or what they know when they apply what they have learned.

7. Send:“The content is not only useful to the reader but also to one or more people in the reader’s network. The reader simply emails the article or a link to it to people that he or she cares.”

When learning organizations or teams learn something of value, they share it with others to make a bigger impact for the organization. Sharing knowledge, ideas, and solutions by “sending” them on to others in their networks is what learning organizations or teams do. It is at the heart of collaboration.

8. Spread:“The reader finds the article fascinating enough to spread it to anyone and everyone via a blog, twitter or the social networks that he or she belongs.”

Spreading ideas through our networks is a characteristic of a learning organization. Technology should be viewed as a natural part of how it works. You should take the time to spread ideas through your organization and networks. Learning organizations and teams spread smart ideas.

9. Subscribe:“This is the ultimate expression of engagement and a vote of confidence that you will continue to provide great content. When the reader wants to continue listening to your thoughts, he or she will subscribe.”

Subscribing is the end result of trust and credibility. All teams are more effective when there is trust. When you prove you are trust worthy, that you have knowledge and ability, and collaborate with your team, you become credible. Team members “subscribe” to credible team members.

Rajesh Setty gives a few more things to consider that are equally valuable for team collaboration.

1. Understand Your Audience“…your audience should be the center of the focus and not you. The more you know about your audience, the better you can connect with them.”

The better we can connect with each other in our teams, the better collaboration we will have, and the better results we will produce for students.

2. Check Your Objective

What is the purpose or goal of your team meeting? If you don’t know what you are walking in the door to discuss then you probably aren’t prepared. If you are not prepared you are not going to be able to add your best during collaboration. Know your objective.

3. Unleash Your Creativity

“You know the audience and you know the purpose... Now the next step is to unleash your creativity and create something that will generate the kind of response that you are looking for.”

Pay attention to the response and feedback you are getting from other members. Notice if they are spamming you, skipping you, scanning you, stopping for you, saving you, being shifted by you, sending you, spreading you, or subscribing to you. Reflect and then adjust your collaboration style to get the results you want.

It really comes down to having a high ROII,"Return on Investment for an Interaction."

February 01, 2011

One trait of a learning organization is having awareness. More than just having it, a learning organization needs to demonstrate A.W.A.R.E.N.E.S.S- (an acronym for focusing on A specific task/goal, Wisdom, Abilities, Response-ability, Education, Network, Experiences, Skills, and Scalable.)

The “W” in AWARENESS is Wisdom. By Wisdom I am referring to Wisdom Stewardship. Wisdom Stewardship is the term I use for the surrounding, broadening, learning, capturing, collecting, and sharing of the best ideas and solutions within a learning organization.

SurroundingLearning Organizations that practice the Wisdom Stewardship associated with AWARENESS surround themselves with the best knowledge and the best talent.

The “best knowledge” simply means that the learning organization seeks the best information, data, ideas, practices, methods, strategies, research, etc., from the best sources. Learning organizations that practice Wisdom Stewardship have a drive to obtain the “best knowledge” they can get their hands on, from the best sources, and use it to increase organizational effectiveness.

The “best talent” means that individuals in the learning organization are constantly using their individual and overlapping Personal Learning Networks to network and connect with the very best sources of “best knowledge.” It is important to note, that the “best talent” may be sitting at the table or maybe across the country depending on what is needed. Learning organizations that practice Wisdom Stewardship must always view each other as starting point for “best knowledge” and “best talent”, but be humble enough to extend out into their networks and scale up their membership as needed.

In other words, learning organizations that have AWARENESS combine the “best knowledge” and the “best talent” to create wisdom which they then become stewards of.

BroadeningWhile the primary starting point for pursuing “best knowledge” and “best talent” will always be the members of the learning organization sitting together, having AWARENESS requires the individuals use their Personal Learning Networks to broaden their scope and their reach to obtain “best knowledge” and “best talent.”

Technology based collaborative networks (Twitter, Facebook, Ning, etc.) allows learning organizations to increase their “surface area” of reach and access to knowledge and talent. Using technology to increase “surface area”, learning organizations are demonstrating good stewardship of wisdom, regardless of geographic location or formal connection to the enterprise.

Broadening insists that teams and individuals use their technology based Personal Learning Networks, and their any other network, to seek out diversity of perspective. Teams should have multi-disciplined networks filled with people from a many disciplines in, and I would suggest, even out of the enterprise. Teams should seek the greatest cognitive diversity (to a point) that is possible. Broadening from themselves to a diverse team of “useful outsiders” whose wisdom can be called upon and leveraged by the team.

LearningAs Michael Fullan would say, “Learning is the work.” Learning organizations demonstrate Wisdom Stewardship when they learn together, especially when they learn in context together. Learning organizations that practice AWARENESS should make every attempt to learn with each other before, during, and after the work and in context as much as possible. Learning organizations that use Wisdom Stewardship develop capacity of individuals as well of teams. Growing in skills, in knowledge, in methodology, experience, and ability, together, is being a good steward of personal, team, and organizational wisdom.

CapturingWisdom Stewardship also requires that wisdom, those best ideas, best practices, innovations, etc., be captured. There are numerous technology platforms that can be used to capture the wisdom of the team and teams can follow their own preferences, but whichever technologies teams choose to use to capture their wisdom, the best choices will be those that are easy to use, easy to access, and easy to share. Being a good steward of wisdom means that there must be a way to go back, to re-trace your learning journey, to remember what has been learned or what has been done. Wisdom Stewardship asks the learning organization to gather, collect, save, archive, and memorialize their wisdom for future use.

SharingThe final key to Wisdom Stewardship is sharing out the wisdom with others. Learning organizations who practice Wisdom Stewardship are very concerned with K.W.O.K, or Knowing What Others Know. This is similar to the Japanese concept of “Yokoten.” The heart of yokoten is that an idea, or wisdom, must be shared. The value comes in two forms- the idea and the sharing.

Learning organizations must overcome the hoarding culture and develop a culture of yokoten, which insists that for the good of the organization, the enterprise, the team, and the individual, great ideas, solutions, and wisdom must be shared with others.

Wisdom Stewardship surrounds, broadens, learns, captures, and shares the developed wisdom of the team to benefit of the organization. It is a key part of building a learning organization that has AWARENESS.